Tonight the last of the NHL has their opening games. Among those, two of the top contenders for the Eastern Conference spot in the Finals. Of course, they don’t play each other, but they will both be playing at the same time. Which is just as good.

I grew up in a home that maintained unwavering allegiance to each of Philadelphia’s four major sports teams. When my parents moved to South Jersey from upstate New York in the mid-seventies, they slowly abandoned previous loyalties to teams like the Yankees in baseball and the Browns in football (hey, Jim Brown is an alum of Syracuse, and apparently those alliances run deep. Right, Afino?) And what a time to move to Philly, eh? In order to welcome my parents to the city, the Flyers decided to win back-to-back Cups in a blue-collar style befitting the the fanbase. This is the last time the city enjoyed back-to-back championships, and the Orange and Black have waved proudly in my dad’s den ever since.

My mom, like many moms, is a sports fan by association. She can’t help that primetime television is eschewed in favor of a meaningless intra-division Flyers-Isles game in late October. Her sports background is irrelevant; she married an avid sports fan, and even worse, she gave birth to a son who may like sports even more than the patriarch. Sure, you may have counterattacked by having a girl, but the men of the house turned her, too. Rumor has it she wore her Chase Utley jersey to teach the first-graders back in my hometown today. (She’s a hopeful soul.) Fortunately for my family, my mom isn’t adverse to being a spectator; in recent years, she’s become as much of a die-hard Philly fan as the rest of us.

The season is now underway, yet the offseason and training camp have offered a delicious medley of strange facts and interesting narratives about the greatest team in the history of the NHL, the Kansas City Scouts Montreal Canadiens. All these things are true.

When Roman Hamrlik was asked what number wanted to wear as a Hab, he said he wanted to keep #4. The Habs’ equipment manager informed him that he would have to climb the Bell Centre rafters and pull down Jean Beliveau’s jersey in order to keep #4. As a result, Hamrlik now wears #44.

The last time the Habs’ AHL team won the Calder cup, the Canadiens won the Stanley Cup the very next season. This was thanks in large part to the 20 year-old goaltender who led the AHL team to victory the year before. His name was Patrick Roy and he doesn’t give a fuck what you think about him.

Carey Price is 20 years-old. He led Hamilton to a Calder Cup victory last year.

Chris Higgins and Mike Komisarek train at the same facility in Long Island in the offseason and this year they also worked with a mental conditioning coach, Gary Parks. He gave them a three-point strategy for dealing with pressure. It includes:

Focus on the one thing you can control with the most confidence.

Focus on the smallest time period.

If you’ve come off a bad shift or period, do the three Fs: Find it, Fix it and Forget it.

Gary Parks also came up with the “Set it and forget it” slogan for the Showtime grill.*

When a French reporter welcomed Phil Mickelson’s wife to Montreal for a recent golf tournament, she replied, “Merci beaucoup.” That reporter then turned to another reporter and said, “That’s more French than Saku Koivu knows.”